Racial profiling, abuse by police and other government officials are a fact of life in the Unites States today, and the problem can be much more severe outside the US in dictatorial countries with oppressive regimes.
No one is immune, and many young black males will attest to instances of profiling and harassment because of their color. Even police officers themselves are not immune. Reuters interviewed 25 African American male officers on the New York Police Department and all but one said that, when off duty and out of uniform, they had been victims of racial profiling, which refers to using race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of having committed a crime. Further, Latino males have the same complaints as African Americans. Since 911, the difficulty is not restricted to African Americans and Latinos, either, and people of Middle Eastern decent have increasingly been targeted for additional scrutiny.
The inventor believes that transparency is the way to curb such abuses—and one way to obtain transparency is to record all police encounters, keeping a record for court use in the event that an unlawful or unnecessary detention and/or arrest is made and/or deadly force is used. Indeed, the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that a citizen has a “constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public.” In at least 38 states, the law allows citizens to record police, as long as the citizen does not physically interfere with police work. However, the police might still unfairly harass a citizen, detain him or her, and confiscate the camera, eliminating any such evidence.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an encounter monitoring system that is fast, not susceptible to illegal confiscation and destruction, and that provides some kind of emergency response system when needed. Furthermore, the ideal system would be able to mine the vast amounts of data collected and provide more extensive reports on individual behavior, as well as compare behavior patterns across department, states lines, even from country to country.